Lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition

Abstract

Four eye-tracking experiments examined lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Dutch listeners hearing English fixated longer on distractor pictures with names containing vowels that Dutch listeners are likely to confuse with vowels in a target picture name (pencil, given target panda) than on less confusable distractors (beetle, given target bottle). English listeners showed no such viewing time difference. The confusability was asymmetric: given pencil as target, panda did not distract more than distinct competitors. Distractors with Dutch names phonologically related to English target names (deksel, Ôlid,Õ given target desk) also received longer fixations than distractors with phonologically unrelated names. Again, English listeners showed no differential effect. With the materials translated into Dutch, Dutch listeners showed no activation of the English words (desk, given target deksel). The results motivate two conclusions: native phonemic categories capture second-language input even when stored representations maintain a second-language distinction; and lexical competition is greater for non-native than for native listeners.

Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: Evidence for nonselective lexical access.

“…For example, Russian-English bilinguals instructed in English to "pick up the marker" often looked at a stamp, because its Russian translation equivalent (marka) is phonologically similar to the English target word marker. Similar results were obtained by Weber and Cutler (2004). Using a picture version of the same paradigm, they also found that Dutch-English bilinguals hearing English (L2) target words (e.g.…”

Novel second-language words and asymmetric lexical access

“…Cutler et al (2006) thus concluded that the L2 category that is phonetically closer to the L1 category emerges as the dominant category for the purpose of auditory word recognition. Does this phonetic closeness argument explain the Weber and Cutler (2004) findings with respect to the dominance of the /e/ category? The argument that Dutch /e/ is phonetically closer to English /e/ than to English /ae/ does not in fact seem to hold when comparing vowel acoustic data from both General American and Standard Southern British English (Deterding, 1997;Peterson & Barney, 1952, respectively) with Dutch data (Pols, Tromp, & Plomp, 1973).…”

“…To answer this question, Weber and Cutler (2004) appeal first to the Dutch native vowel inventory, which contains the phonetic category /e/ but not /ae/. The authors suggest that the native status of the category /e/, although it has a different phonetic realization in the two languages, is responsible for its use when perceiving the nonnative contrast.…”

“…Cutler et al (2006) set out to answer two questions raised by the Weber and Cutler (2004) study: First, can the asymmetry reflecting contrastive lexical representations be replicated in different listener populations, and second, what explains the lexical 'dominance' of one of the members of the L2 contrast over the other ? Cutler et al (2006) performed a replication of the Weber and Cutler (2004) study, this time with native Japanese speakers listening to words contrasted by English /r/ and /l/, and found a similar asymmetric pattern of lexical activation, with auditory /r/ words inducing looks to /l/ pictures, but not the reverse, suggesting that /l/ was the dominant category for lexical activation. In an effort to understand the direction of the asymmetry, they first noted that the Japanese liquid consonant is phonetically closer to English /l/ than it is to English /r/ (Aoyama et al, 2004).…”

“…These acoustic data (in the form of F1 and F2 values) show that Dutch /e/ seems to lie between the two English vowels. Weber and Cutler (2004) suggest that the phonetic closeness may be perceptual in that English /e/ may be a better perceptual match to Dutch /e/ than English /ae/. However, Cutler et al (2004, p. 273) show that Dutch listeners classified both English /e/ and /ae/ with the same level of accuracy (i.e., below 60%), which suggests that having a common native category does not necessarily result in more accurate perceptual performance.…”